wile_E2005 Review of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998 Video)

The Scooby-Doo movie that started it all...

[6/10 · 16 February 2007]

By the early 1990s, the Scooby-Doo franchise was starting to wear thin. They were making "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo," which was absolutely brilliant! It made good jokes poking at the old formula, but people were beginning to grow tired of the old-school, outdated techniques that Hanna-Barbera was doing (limited animation, cheesy writing and music, their trademark Hanna-Barbera sound effects). So in 1994, with the success of the "Animaniacs" animated TV series, Hanna-Barbera decided to try and make an animated TV movie done in the same style as an old Warner Bros. cartoon, by upgrading to full animation, fully-orchestrated "Carl Stalling"-like music scores, doing the same comedy and gags that "Animaniacs" employed, and using all-new sound effects to make the cartoon blend in with the 1990s, in their TV movie "Arabian Nights." They decided to have Scooby-Doo and Shaggy appear in it, too. Unfortunately, that film was a disaster, and marked the end of an era for Hanna-Barhera. So, flash forward to 1998. Hanna-Barbera decided to breathe new life into the Scooby-Doo franchise, updating it in a better way than "Arabian Nights" tried to do. The actual production of the movie was outsourced over to Warner Bros. Animation, the studio most famous for creating Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the Looney Tunes. But you won't find Chuck Jones's or Friz Freleng's or Bob Clampett's work here. WB made a more professional, dark, and more realistic Scooby-Doo animated feature! Since Shaggy was depicted eating meat, Casey Kasem (who is a vegetarian) refused to voice Shaggy, and will only voice him if Shaggy is a vegetarian, too. So Billy West does Shaggy's voice. I must admit, he does a pretty good Shaggy! Billy West is a great modern-day voice actor, supplying the voices for Fry, Stimpy the Cat, the Cheerios Honeybee and many other 'toons out there. But Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby-Doo, died before the film was put in production. It's really sad, cause Don did the best Scooby voice ever. So Scott Innes was hired to voice Scooby. I'm sorry to say it, but Scott can't do a really good Scooby-Doo. He makes him sound like Roger Rabbit. It doesn't match the quality that Don Messick's Scooby-Doo voice had. Velma is now voiced by veteran actress B.J. Ward, and does a good job at it, too. Velma went through many actress changes over the years, but Nicole Jaffe will always be the best Velma. Daphne's new voice makes her sound too perky. Frank Welker, however, returned to voice Fred, and he can still do the voice well. Here, Fred is actually very funny! I love it when he makes jokes on how they used to solve mysteries. "It's probably a hologram of a man in a pirate suit." "It's probably the gardener in disguise!" "That's just a mask"! Little does he know that the monsters are REAL! The commercials advertised it as, "THIS time, the monsters are real!" But they had real monsters on the show, before, back in the 1980s. Not just bad ones in "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo," but some GOOD monsters as well, like in "Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School." Here, the zombies are the good guys, but the werecats are not. Another thing here is the animation. Don't expect the second-rate animation you see on Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Warner Bros. Animation is doing it now, and they give it a more realistic, full-animated look that will be seen in all other Scooby-Doo movies WB produced after this. Fred and Daphne now got a wardrobe change, too. But it's still better than the clothes they wear on "What's New, Scooby-Doo." The music is no longer cartoon-style music. Here, it sounds more professionally-scored, sort of like a modern-day Disney film. But there is a downside to Termite Terrace producing the Scooby-Doo movies. They began phasing out the classic Hanna-Barbera sound effects that enhanced the older Scooby-Doo cartoons. Newer, digitally-recorded sound effects are now heard here, and the H-B SFX are now only used for sequences featuring Scooby and Shaggy in them. This also unfortunately carried out to "What's New, Scooby-Doo." The Mystery Machine was also changed, here. It is now a standard minivan with the classic colors added. In 2002, they brought back the old Mystery Machine, but with GPS equipment and computers and more modern junk. Anyways, this is the very first Scooby-Doo animated movie that Warner Bros. Animation produced, and they have taken over production on the Scooby franchise ever since. But this is a pretty good movie, actually. It's too bad most of the others were a bunch of crap, with a few exceptions (see my other comments for details). I recommend this, but only for those over eight years old.